Leeds Empties: A template for tackling complex social problems

Our starting point for Leeds Empties was this:  what can we do as a business to get better at solving complex social problems?

Eighteen months ago we decided to change how we worked.  Up until then, we’d been social enterprise support generalists – working with people to help them to set up and run social enterprises in lots of different markets.

A couple of things changed.  One – the bottom fell out of the business support market.  Two – we found ourselves increasingly restless – frustrated by rarely being able to get stuck into a social issue in any great detail.  What difference were we really making?

So we decided to experiment.  We made three big changes:

• We would focus on one social issue at a time
• We would go beyond social enterprise and work with anyone and everyone who could help us to make progress on solving that issue
• We would focus on our home city – Leeds

We considered a few social issues but the one that jumped out at us was empty homes.  We soon learnt that Leeds has 5000 long-term empty homes.  We also realised the council – and a number of social enterprises – were working hard to tackle the problem.  But if we were to make a real dent in that 5000 figure, it was pretty clear that there was room to do more.

Our early work centred around a Call To Action.  We wanted to generate interest in the issue – and bring together people who could help us to make progress on solving the problem at hand.  We struck lucky as TV architect and empty homes campaigner George Clarke agreed to get involved.  This gave us profile – and ensured the Call To Action was a sell-out.  In total, 100 people attended, 20 local businesses pledged support to empty-homes social ventures, and countless ideas were explored.

In the months that followed we explored a number of these ideas further.  We got a bit of investment to help us to pilot a few ideas – and as a result we decided to focus on five main areas of work:

• EMPTY HOMES DOCTOR – one-to-one support for owners of empty homes
• GREEN EMPTIES – identifying opportunities for green retrofit, with environmental and fuel poverty benefits
• INVEST IN EMPTIES – explore investment opportunities, including community share issues and social impact bonds
• JOBS, TRAINING AND APPRENTICESHIPS – make the most of the opportunity empty homes offer to help people find work
• SUPPORT FOR SOCIAL VENTURES – help new and existing social enterprises and self-help schemes to start-up and grow

We explored these areas of work further during last week’s Leeds Empties Week, which marked the end of our six-month pilot project.  More than 150 people attended a range of events throughout the week, including a tour of two empty homes undergoing a ‘deep-green’ refurbishment – through to an event for home owners introducing them to our Empty Homes Doctor.

So where do we go now?  We are close to securing longer-term funding for Leeds Empties – which will allow us to deliver on each of the five areas of work outlined above.  We’re particularly keen to do more on the Empty Homes Doctor as more than 40 owners of empty homes contacted us last week to ask for support.

The idea behind the Empty Homes Doctor service is that there’s a personal story behind each empty home.  To help bring the property back into use, you need to understand this story – work out how the home has become empty – and explore options for bringing it back into use.  We hope this problem-solving approach will help to bring hundreds more empty homes back into use in Leeds over the next three years.

There’s a bigger picture for us too, beyond empty homes.  We’d like to think we can take what we’ve learnt through Leeds Empties and adapt it to tackling other social issues.  Our guiding principle is that complex social problems require a range of creative solutions.  No one organisation, no one sector, is able to solve the problem.  But perhaps that’s where we can help – raising awareness of the issue, gathering people together to explore ideas for tackling it – and then getting behind people who want to create change.